Lost's Truth Serum Has Some Credibility

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Oct 30, 2009

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There are quite a few differences between the Dharma Initiative and our 815 survivors, and last night's episode of Lost, "He's Our You," highlighted a few. For one, Dharma members vote on big decisions. With the Losties, Jack—or Locke, depending on whether Science or Faith is winning—makes the call. For another, while the 815 survivors turned to physical torture as their main form of getting information, the Dharma went the mental route—via psychedelic drugs.

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In order to get the truth out of Sayid—who the members of the Dharma Initiative believe is a Hostile—Dharma's resident hippie/torturer Oldham doses the former interrogator with a drop of "truth serum" after restraining him, supposedly for his own safety. Apparently, the drug worked. When Sayid woke up, he told the truth—only in this situation, the truth was so wacky ("I am from the future!") that Oldham and company thought they'd overdosed their prisoner, suggesting maybe half-a-dropper would have sufficed.

While the whole situation has a very Timothy Leary feel to it—more on that later. The reality is that many governments have experimented with psychoactive drugs as "truth serums"—including the CIA and the KGB. One of the more popular truth-telling techniques is the "Amytal Interview," in which a patient is given amobarbital (the generic name for the drug, which is a barbiturate) through an IV every few minutes for about an hour. "The patient is drowsy and slurred of speech, but awake—the so-called "twilight state" for the duration of the interview," writes Dr. August Piper Jr., writes in a newsletter called "'Truth Serum' and 'What Really Happened,'". Dr. Piper is a psychologist who has written about "truth serum" in the Journal of Psychiatry and the Law. He explains that the effects of the IV administration of the drug are similar to the effects one would feel under Valium—or even after having a few too many beers.

Dr. Piper writes that the Amytal Interview was popular in the 1930s and 1940s, but eventually proved pretty useless: "One characteristic of good science is a sincere attempt to disprove its own theories. This principle was applied to the belief that people always tell the truth under Amytal—that is, patients were tested to see if they could tell falsehoods during Amytal interviews. They could. During such interviews, could people deliberately attempt to deceive an interviewer? They could. Could they report false or exaggerated symptoms of psychological disorders? Again, they could. Withhold information? Yes. In time, other studies revealed more information. They showed that during Amytal administration, patients often demonstrate a distorted sense of time, show memory disturbances, and have difficulty evaluating and selecting thoughts. In addition, under Amytal, patients' claims about details of their histories—events, places, names, dates—are untrustworthy. Further, these investigations noted that the drug also makes patients vulnerable to either accidental or deliberate suggestions from the interviewer. Finally, and most importantly, patients under Amytal fail to reliably discriminate between reality and fantasy."

Researchers have experimented with other drugs (including LSD) as potential "truth serums," but their effectiveness has not been proven beyond all doubt. Many experiments involving psychedelic drugs and their effect on the mind were done as a part of the Harvard Psilocybin Project, headed by Timothy Leary and his associate, Richard Alpert(!). Both men were eventually fired for their experiments on students, but it gives us something interesting to think about—at least until next week, when we'll finally know, thanks to Sayid's actions, if Faraday's theories about time travel, paradox and the past are fact or fiction. –Erin Scottberg